Agape Enterprise is pleased to present “true confessions in progress,” a solo exhibition by Robin Graubard, which consists of an installation of her newest photographs and a video work of the same title that is newly produced for this exhibition in collaboration with Agape Enterprise.

Through the compilation of images that are diverse both in content and production methods, Robin Graubard’s work destabilizes categories that define documentary/autobiography, personal/political, differentiation/identification, and photographic genres while obscuring hierarchies of photographic production.

Applying decades of her experience as a journalist, Graubard’s work investigates diverse spheres of our society including political affairs, lives of the wealthy and the poor, providential family life, youth/drug culture, bohemian lives of artists, and warfare, both in the United States and the so-called “third world.” In an attempt to organize the seemingly chaotic world, Graubard amasses these images into meta-autobiographical histories. Alternately, the cycle of power/victimization/resistance suggested through her assemblage reveals the ambiguity of her own subjectivity as a photographer, which is constructed through both “othering of” and identification with her subjects.

While the dominant images of photographic assemblage are of “public” spheres, her video work predominantly focuses on her “private” affairs. It interweaves images of the artist with family, her solitary walk on the seaside and countryside, a scene from Bresson’s film and her collection of family photographs, letters, notes and other documents she acquired through traveling. It conveys a feeling of an outsider/displaced person both at home and on travel; a yearning to be released, and a desire to be accepted. The work is shot handheld with an i-phone and a digital camera. The camera work restlessly roves, searches, rotates, loses and finds its focus, and reveals her approach to the world as a photographer. The melancholy of the work reaches to moments of clarity and beauty, as the clouds on the beach give way to moments of sunlight and warmth.